One of the great advantages of the printed literary text has been its ability to absorb a reader's attention to the point that the reader becomes immersed in the environment created by the words of the author, losing awareness of the words themselves, the pages on which they are printed, and the acts of turning the pages to continue the immersive experience. Modern books have been designed so as to maximize the degree of immersion for readers at a minimum cost and inconvenience. Modern authors have followed guidelines that intensify the reader's immersion in their works to the point that time in the reader's world loses all importance to the reader, a profound achievement. But all these achievements fail to take advantage of the possibilities of electronic texts.
Electronic texts have emerged as superior replacements for printed works in certain areas of publication, particularly those areas in which links within the texts lead to references, alternative narratives, or supporting materials of other kinds such as audio or image streams. But these advantages gain little recognition in the realm of mass-market literature such as fiction and nonfiction.
The hardware devices used so far to present electronic literature are expensive, mutually incompatible, and complicated to use. The forms in which the literature is presented mimic fairly closely the forms used in the printed media, in an effort to preserve the immersive reading experience. The advantages presented by the availability of textual linkages in the electronic form are rarely exploited. Such exploitation would yield great and diverse benefits for authors, publishers, and readers across the board.
To illustrate with an example from fiction, many conventional novels and series of novels present richly-realized settings, characters, cultures, and story threads for their readers. One such series of novels is J. R. R. Tolkien's “The Lord of the Rings”, which offers the reader a world of such scope and complexity that the reader becomes immersed in that world with little effort, and remains immersed no matter how many characters, stories, languages, timelines, and events are presented. Many readers, not satisfied with a single reading, repeat their reading of the series many times, and plumb the complexities of its appendices, languages, maps, and other supplementary materials included with the story itself. This deeper reading process, however, is hindered, not facilitated, by the use of the printed form of text and other material.
Specifically, some characters are presented with multiple names used on different occasions, e.g., the character named Gandalf, Mithrandir, Olorin, Tharkun, Incanus, Grey Pilgrim, and so on. Some locations are given different names by people of different kinds, e.g.,
the mountain called Redhorn, Carathras, or Azanulbizar; or the castle called Orthanc or Isengard. Some narratives are relegated to appendices, footnotes, or other separate areas of the printed work.
The histories of specific sites, people, and objects are rich and filled with meaning not easily apparent on first (or even later) reading. The ordering and interrelation of events is so complex that the reader must often take their arrangement on faith while reading, not always understanding exactly how things are arranged until after the reading is complete, and not always then either. The success of the work arises not out of the clarity of its every component during reading, but rather from the overwhelming wealth and consistency of its presentation.
Readers, authors, and publishers would benefit greatly from a mode of presentation which facilitates enhanced wealth and consistency of content while also increasing the clarity of the work for a reader and preserving the immersive reading experience.